Community Supporters

Maternity Friends and Family Test

What is the NHS Friends and Family Test?

The NHS Friends and Family Test is based on one straightforward question that we are asking people who are accessing a wide range of NHS services. It means you can give your feedback about the care you have received. The NHS wants to make sure that you have the best possible experience of care and the NHS Friends and Family Test is a way of gathering your feedback, so we can understand what has worked well and, where necessary, make improvements.

How does it work?

As you progress through your pregnancy and access different maternity services, you will be given the opportunity to answer the NHS Friends and Family Test question. You’ll have the opportunity to give us your views on antenatal care, birthing care and postnatal care… so you might be
asked the question up to 3 or 4 times, so we can make sure we can improve every stage of maternity care.

The question will be slightly different depending on the particular service you have just used, but will look like this:

How likely are you to recommend our ‘maternity service’ to friends and family if they needed similar care and treatment?

You’ll be able to select from the following responses:
Extremely likely
Likely
Neither likely or unlikely
Unlikely
Extremely unlikely
Don’t know

We also encourage you to provide us with more information so we can understand why you chose your particular answer. This is optional, but it does mean we learn a little more about your experience, including what we did well and where we can look to make improvements.

Your NHS maternity provider will offer you the opportunity to answer the question at the appropriate time, using the collection method that they have chosen to use. When you answer the question you can include your name, but you don’t have to.

How will the results be used?

Your feedback will help us to learn more about our services.

We want you to tell us what we are doing well – so we can do more of it, but it’s also important that you tell us what you didn’t like and where we can do better. We’ll use your feedback to make changes that will help us to offer a continually improving standard of maternity care.

Will the results be published?

Our results are published below and are also available on the NHS Choices website. This is part of the NHS’s commitment to be open and transparent and give patients in-depth information about health services.

Our results

Following an NHS England review of FFT, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been replaced by a new scoring system based on the percentage of patients who would recommended the ward/service and percentage of patients who would not recommended the ward/service. It is anticipated that this will be a more comprehensive method for measuring patient satisfaction.